That's not democracy it's dictatorship!

In one of the recent FOCUS ON LOWER KENTDALE sheets from the LibDems that we are being deluged with in my area, there was a bit piece on the bottom of the front page that states there are "just 777 votes in it!"

I'd like to point out to the LibDems that this isn't a General Election and that Tim Farron is not going to lose his MP seat on May 3rd, so the size of his majority is not an issue at all, it's just scaremongering and distraction!

On May 3rd we are going to the polls to elect new SLDC councillors. 

Currently 31 of the 51 SLDC councillors are LibDems. They have an absolute majority and can thus do as they please with no-one and no group able to stop them. That's not democracy it's dictatorship!

This is the current breakdown of councillors on SLDC:

You can see that currently even if the Tories, Labour and the Indie all join forces they still cannot prevent the LibDems doing anything!

All councils and all governments work better with an effective opposition. 

We need more Labour councillors on the district council: to give a balance, to provide checks on decision-making, and to be a voice for the people.

Labour are standing candidates in every SLDC ward in Westmorland & Lonsdale. Even if you usually just vote for LibDem or Tory as the two dominant parties, why not this year opt for a Labour candidate?  Most wards have three seats, so having one Labour candidate in a ward isn't going to bring the end of the world, but it will bring the start of a more democratic council! 

Please think about it on May 3rd.

Tories and LibDems together in government from 2010-15, and Tories alone since then, have been responsible for the biggest cuts to local services in my lifetime, and I suspect yours too. Do you really want to see more cutbacks in services, more money wasted on frivolous projects, more decisions taken by one dominant party, or would you rather have a round-the-table, common-sense, representational approach from your local council? 

It's in YOUR hands!

See also the South Lakes Labour news page here: https://www.southlakeslabour.org.uk/blog

Canned 'Kippers

Last month as part of the OpenMedia campaign against the so-called Link Tax, or more properly the European Commission’s proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, I emailed the MEPs who represent my area (i.e. the North West of England) raising concerns about how the Directive would adversely impact on a whole host of internet users from bloggers like me to new internet-based businesses and would ride rough-shod over existing rights across the whole of the Internet.

My email was as follows:

Sent: Thursday 23 February 2017 03:56
Subject: Save the Link: No #linktax or mandatory censorship

Dear Member of the European Parliament,

I am writing to express my concern about the Commission’s proposal on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, announced on September 14.

I am worried about the proposals in Article 11 and 13 which amount to a link tax, and mandatory censorship.

The “Link Tax” proposal creates a new ancillary copyright for press publishers. This new right would create unprecedented new monopolies for publishing giants to charge fees for snippets of text that automatically accompany hyperlinks.

The Link Tax will act as a brake to innovative EU digital startups that will never be able to get off the ground if forced to pay these fees. This proposal has failed everywhere it has been previously tried, including Germany and Spain.

I draw your attention to a briefing on this issue produced by the Save The Link campaign (https://SaveTheLink.org), which I support. You can download the briefing here: https://openmedia.org/sites/default/files/documents/mepbriefing-singlepgsinteractive_0.pdf

I am also very concerned about the new proposal for content filtering and increased liability of Internet companies. The proposal at Article 13 includes requirements for monitoring Internet users, demanding that tech companies produce filtering robots to detect the copyright status of user-generated content. This filtering would not be done on the basis on what is legal, but on whether uploads contain content that has been "identified" by rightsholders. This would overturn existing rights for quotation, parody and other public-interest copyright exceptions.

The European Commission pushed this idea forward despite overwhelming opposition in its consultation from over 120,000 Internet users and dozens of civil society groups.

The Commission has failed to defend the interests of citizens – we need you to stand up and act as our voice.

We ask you to pay close attention to Article 11 which proposes an ancillary copyright for press publishers as well as Article 13 and recitals 38 and 39 which propose mandated content filtering technologies.

Please, stand up for my rights and challenge these proposals which will seriously harm the Internet, and the citizens you represent.

I look forward to hearing your response.

In the North West there are eight MEPs: 3 Labour, 1 LibDem, 1 Tory, and 3 UKIP.  To date I have had a reply from just one MEP, UKIP's Paul Nuttall (the man who failed to gain the Stoke on Trent seat for UKIP in the recent parliamentary by-election).  His response was risible:

Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive

Now we are leaving the European Union we will not be bound by their rules, it will be up to member states to decide such legislation for themselves.

Fortunately, once we have left the EU we can again decide our own legislation, via our democratically elected U.K. Parliament.

Thus, even if the EU Parliament votes through this Directive, we can later chose to delete it from our Statutes.

Apart from not even having the courtesy of a personalised response - what I have copied above is exactly what was in his emailed reply - it appears to be the sort of basic stock response that any UKIP MEP might send out to any query about any piece of EU legislation. 

A British MEP's final take-home pay (which varies from month to month based on the exchange rate) is roughly £3,900 per month, a sum for which I expect a darn-sight better response than a canned "when we leave the EU all will be well"! 

Labour lacks "serious opposition" claims Lord Mandelson

Peter Mandelson expressed his concern that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership is a problem not just for Labour, but for the country, when he appeared on the BBC's HardTalk last night. "It is a very, very bad and sad day for this country," Lord Mandelson said, "when we do not have a serious opposition and a serious alternative to the Government."

I am not sure where Peter Mandelson has been keeping himself since September 12th, but there is more serious and active opposition by the current Opposition than we have seen in the Labour Party in many a long year.

During the interview by Stephen Sackur, Mandelson repeated many of the same old untruths and bits of misinformation that we have read and heard in the media over the last several months. His claims that Jeremy Corbyn is "far-left", that Harriet Harman opened the door to everyone to join in with the £3 vote, that Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind about Trident at the Labour Party Conference, and that despite Corbyn's claim of his belief in equality he appointed men to the top Shadow Cabinet positions.

Just for the record, Corbyn is not "far-left", his views reflect those of many others on the left or centre-left (not far-left or hard-left or even ultra-hard-left!) of the Party, even many in the centre of it! In fact, until the Blairite tendency moved the Party so far to the right that it was hard to differentiate between the Blairites and the Tories, Corbyn's views on many issues were pretty much standard Labour Party policy!

Harriet Harman did not come up with the £3 vote scheme. It was actually a change brought in by Ed Miliband in 2014 and supported by Mandelson's former boss, Tony Blair! In fact Blair actually said that it was a reform that his own leadership should have thought of.

And as for the Trident issue at Party Conference, that was not Corbyn's call either. At Labour Party conferences there is a committee which determines which subjects are debated. The short-list of subjects are put to a vote of those attending, thus it was conference itself which decided not to discuss the issue of Trident this year. 

As for the top Shadow Cabinet positions statement, this is very much a macho attitude! That positions of Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary are seen as the Top Jobs reflects an out-of-date view of what are priorities in government and society. Implying that the other Shadow Cabinet roles are less important denigrates whole sectors of society. It infers that health, education, employment, business, welfare, environment, transport, etc are less important issues, whereas to the electorate and I suspect to Corbyn these are most often the most important aspects of government as they have a direct and personal effect on each and every one of us. Cut backs in health or education funding have a more direct impact on us than does our foreign policy, yet Foreign Secretary is considered to be a Top Job by some. Clearly Corbyn will form his own opinions on what is important, but his first Shadow Cabinet does have a majority of women members - the first time any frontbench team has done so, so that's one up for him then!

Now we have corrected Lord Mandelson, what else can we say about the interview? Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable, and he cannot lead the Labour Party to victory and government, seems to be two main themes of Mandelson's spiel. In between the chest-beating mea culpa lament of "We didn't make enough changes ourself" and "We lost our way" type comments, it is quite clear that Mandelson has no intention of supporting the new leader or his attempt to win the next election. There was a lot of talk of "being ready" for when Corbyn goes (he said stands down but could just as easily have meant gets pushed out) and lots of guff about the Party not sharing Corbyn's aims for the Party, despite his "stonking" victory in the leadership election with just shy of 60% of the votes across all three voting sections.

Mandelson's sly inference that it was only the £3 supporters and the trades unions members voting that gave Corbyn his victory belies the fact that the full member vote of 121,751 out of 245,520 for Corbyn was only just shy of the 50% victory mark in itself, A further 1,010 full members voting for him would have given Corbyn the leadership even without the ability of the registered supporters and the trades unions members to vote, and Corbyn polled almost as many votes alone as the other three candidates did between them!  On that basis Mandelson cannot justify any claim that full members do not agree with Jeremy Corbyn's policies.

Mandelson's claimed that 47%  of the people who voted Labour in the 2015 General Election do not see Corbyn as leadership material, but that could also mean that 53% do see him as such!  But what about the 35% of the electorate who have not voted for anyone, many of whom claim they cannot see any difference between the Tories, LibDems and New Labour, so why vote?  Those people are amongst the sector of the electorate which has been excited and energised by the emergence of Corbyn as the Labour Party Leader. Many of them are becoming politically active for the first time ever, and come 2020 they will no longer be in the silent third, they will be voting!

Meanwhile, right across the country members and supporters are readying themselves to fight local elections in 2016. Indeed, some are already planning their campaign in the by-election caused by the death recently of the veteran MP, Michael Meacher.  Those of us who will be campaigning for local council seats do so in the strong hope that this will help the Party win votes and seats in the general election in 2020 also. We expect that it will be a hard fight; after all, we have to reconnect with an electorate that has become increasingly disillusioned with the New Labour Party of Blair and Mandelson, and it is to them that we have to establish our credibility as a Party fit for government. That job will be made all the harder by the whingers and the doomsayers, such as Mandelson, undermining the Party's democratically elected leader! So my message to him, and others like him, is this, "Button it! Support Corbyn. Help us win!"

"And Labour are putting 11 candidates up for election."

Readers might wonder at the curious title of this post, but it is a quote from that august local newspaper, The Westmorland Gazette, which is published in Kendal and has been reporting Westmorland news since 1818.

I was interested to read on its About Us page, that it says,

The Westmorland Gazette, first published in 1818, is independent of political parties, private interests and government.

as that was not the impression I gained whilst looking back through coverage of the run up to the 2015 local council elections.

The article in question, entitled Lines drawn in local battle goes into great detail  about the seats held by the Conservative party, the dominance of the Liberal Democrat party, the strength of the field of the Green Party and the decision of one candidate to stand as an independent. But of the Labour Party candidates not a whiff, not a mention, not a hint, until the very last line, which reads like a last-minute addendum along the lines of, "Oh bother we forgot to mention Labour, just stick it on the end, no-one will notice!"

Guess what, Westmorland Gazette? It was noticed! So if you really mean what you say on your About Us page, would you please give equal billing to all parties in future elections?  After all, you would not like to be considered biased in any way, would you? Would you???